I was surprised when this issue was raised in the training today. The census doesn’t rank highly on my radar, or on that of any organisations that I’m involved in. Should it though ?
Fair Play for Women certainly seem to think so. Not only did they take part in the census consultations, they even took the census authorities to court.
They say that it matters because it’s important that government bodies have access to “robust data” on sex, and that this data is vital to ensuring adequate service provision.
There’s a very simple retort to this. Services have been slashed for thirteen years by a Tory government that’s seldom shown much regard for evidence based arguments. If we want to improve women’s access to healthcare and childcare, then we should be focusing our efforts on building strong unions and a resolute political opposition.
The question that the census asks is “What is your sex ?” The question hasn’t changed, so it’s a fair assumption that the way in which a trans person might answer it in the future will be more or less consistent with how they might have answered it in 2001 or 2011. And if a few thousand trans people are giving an answer that’s not consistent with their birth sex, that’s still only a tiny percentage of the millions answering the question.
The census authorities, recognising that this was a complex issue, consulted extensively in the runup to the 2021 census. They got quite a bit of feedback saying that trans people weren’t altogether comfortable with the question, or how to answer it. Various alternative suggestions were made. Groups like Stonewall and Gendered Intelligence were involved.
Let’s be absolutely clear: this wasn’t some sinister trans campaign to subvert the census or somehow erase women. It’s in everyone’s interests that as many trans people as possible complete the census in a way that’s transparent and consistent; and the inclusion in the 2021 census of a second question on gender identity has been hugely valuable. The census authorities aren’t anyone’s fools, and they take their methodology in designing the census very seriously.
There is a hidden agenda behind all this though and the clue to it is on Fair Play for Women’s website – “Our aim is to facilitate the much-needed factual discussion about the importance of sex-based policies for women.” Fair Play for Women aren’t doing this out of a deep seated concern about robust data. They’re doing this because they believe that it helps them to build a case that UK law should recognise biological sex as determining people’s rights and identities. If that were to happen of course, there would be a bonfire of longstanding rights for trans people, and a lot of cis women would suffer harm as well.
Optimism of the Will 